Conor Kostick on RTÉ Two's Elev8 show promoting Edda

Conor Kostick appeared on RTÉ Two's Elev8 show to promote the newly published Edda. You can watch it here (until 16-June-2011). Conor appears about 12 minutes in. You can see that he is slightly thrown by the introduction, where the presenter Ivan wrongly thinks the film Avatar was inspired by the trilogy. Conor keeps his cool however and this is a good advert for the book. I like the way he is captioned as AWESOME AUTHOR.

Update: Conor writes:

Elev8 is a fun, fast-paced, show for kids on the Irish state channel, RTE2. When I got there I was hugely surprised to find the presenters of the show - Diana and Ivan - dressed up as characters from the film Avatar. They had gotten the idea from the fact the Epic-Saga-Edda series is called the Avatar Chronicles. The producer explained to me that they knew my books were different to the film, but it was a chance to have some fun with the make-up department, who had risen to the challenge. Their costumes were great, unfortunately though, in their opening remarks, both Diana and Ivan attributed the idea of the film to me, which isn't at all true. Still, the rest of the interview went well and I even got a chance to wave to Maya, my two-year-old daughter. When I got home, Aoife and I played the recording to Maya and she loved it, saying 'again' each time I waved to her and forcing us to rewind that moment over and over.

The program itself went out live, which was rather nerve-wracking in the few minutes before we began. Even though I've done a fair bit of TV it's usually pre-recorded - say for a history documentary - and we can reshoot if I don't get it right first time. Here, I was conscious that I could say something very foolish. It's a kind of vertigo you get just before things start happening. But once the questions came, you lose most of that self-conscious feeling. Diana and Ivan seemed genuinely interested in what I was saying, which helped.

Then came that strange game, where they avatarised three (turns out only two worked) famous people. Unfortunately, I am very ignorant of the person who they claimed was the most famous person in the world, I'm not a Belieber, so I was very stuck for that one. Nor was Brian O'Driscoll easy to recognise. Still, they helped me along with outrageously easy clues and I got through it. What was really good, although it doesn't quite come across in the clip, is that I could see the large screen behind the presenters, which was showing the Viking promo clip for Saga. Also, there was some pretty fast paced dance music going on the whole time to make the atmosphere of the studio feel more exciting. All in all it was a blast and I'm glad they invited me on the show.